In 2017, Executive Director Mary Beth Staine and Katy Program Manage Lori Bokone helped Bo's Place to provide support groups to more than 1,300 grieving individuals who had lost a loved one.

In 2017, Executive Director Mary Beth Staine and Katy Program Manage Lori Bokone helped Bo's Place to provide support groups to more than 1,300 grieving individuals who had lost a loved one.

Photo: Tracy Maness

Image 2 of 4

One thousand origami cranes hang from the ceiling of the dining area at Bo's Place. Each crane has a message to a loved one that was lost.

One thousand origami cranes hang from the ceiling of the dining area at Bo's Place. Each crane has a message to a loved one that was lost.

Photo: Tracy Maness

Image 3 of 4

Bo's Place

Bo's Place

Photo: Bo's Place

Image 4 of 4

Bo's Place offers support to the grieving

1 / 4

Back to Gallery

Most people will lose someone they care about during their lives, but Bo's Place has been helping bereaved children, families and adults since 1990.

The organization offers an information and referral phone line, support groups in both English and Spanish and special training for who those work with people who are grieving.

Executive Director Mary Beth Staine said Bo's Place began 27 years ago when two clinicians had both experienced the death of a child and decided there were not enough resources in Houston to help the bereaved. They started an information and referral line, directing people toward help where it was available, but Staine said they quickly realized that more needed to be done. At that point the two clinicians reached out to family of Bo Neuhaus, who had died of liver cancer in 1985.

"Part of the reason they wanted to name the place Bo's Place was because Bo had a spirit about him that was uplifting," Staine said. "He understood that he was going to die. He wanted his funeral to be fun and uplifting and not sad because in his mind, he was going to be joining God. So he wanted balloons and fireworks at his funeral."

Recommended Video:

Now Playing:

The number of people thought to have died in California's destructive mudslides has been put at 17 with at least a dozen more still missing.
Over a 100 homes have been destroyed and around 300 damaged after walls of mud poured through affluent communities along a stretch of Southern California coastline.
Verdant hillsides that had provided estates with a sense of seclusion were largely denuded by last month's historic wildfires, making them vulnerable to the massive mud and debris slides that sent boulders crashing into homes, turned highways into raging rivers and shredded cars into tangles of metal.
Santa Barbara Country Sheriff Bill Brown:
"Our coroner's office and our forensic unit are working around the clock to make careful identifications to be absolutely positive that we make the right identifications, and to work with and notify the next of kin.
At this time, we are not ready to release the names of the victims or identifying information, but I anticipate that we will be doing that in the near future."
Rescuers are combing wreckage for victims - more than 50 people have been rescued but many places remain inaccessible 48 hours after roads were left impassible.
The US coast Guard has sent multiple vessels to support rescue operations and help with evacuations.

Media: Euronews

She said then they rented a small house near the museum district from Interfaith Ministries for several years until they began to outgrow the space and had a capital campaign, so Bo's Place has been at its location on Buffalo Speedway near NRG Park for 17 years.

According to Staine, last year more than 1,300 individuals participated in support groups, and over 2,000 inquiries were responded to over the information and referral line.

Staine said four or five year years ago the board of directors felt that as traffic had grown more challenging, they needed to expand their services into west Houston, so they started a support group there. Today, about 65 or 70 families meet in the original location at a time, and about the same number meet at the Church of the Holy Apostles off the Grand Parkway in Katy.

A major part of what the organization does is host support groups for families. The children's group are age-appropriate, and Staine said family members are ideally in separate groups so that they have the opportunity to speak for themselves.

Doing activities helps the children begin to open up about their grief and other topics, so many of the rooms where children meet have items like lapboards, crayons, sand trays and toys, Staine said.

"What we know is [for many] of us, it's hard to sit in a circle and look at each other and open up and share, but sometimes if your hands are busy doing an activity, it's going to lend itself to something where it might be easier to share," Staine said.

Two of the rooms at Bo's Place are called tornado rooms, and the walls are padded to give children and teens the ability to communicate and deal with their feelings through physical actions.

."Children are physical in their grief, so the tornado room is really a space where we can do some physical activities," said Katy Program Manager Lori Bokone. "So we always come with an idea in mind, whether it's anger [or another emotion] and being able to express that."

On many of the walls at Bo's Place, quilts hang from where each of the participants in the support groups creates a square. Volunteers then quilt together the squares.

Outside, the Little Friends groups, children aged three to five years, learn about life and death in Matthew's Garden, which was created about a year ago.

"We talk about how all plants have a lifetime. Animals and people have a lifetime, and we let them have that experience of finding those things in nature that have a lifespan and a lifecycle," Bokone said.

The location also has a kitchen, where families gather for potluck dinners before their groups start so that they can eat and unwind after often traveling through traffic to get there.

Staine said for about six years, Bo's Place has made a major effort to expand its services to the growing Hispanic community through translating materials, hiring three bilingual clinicians, recruiting bilingual volunteers and making its website bilingual. She said the long-term goal is to have everything that they offer in English also in Spanish.

Another initiative has been to start some groups at schools in communities where children would have trouble getting to Bo's Place. Staine said currently the organization is working in four schools but is considering ways to expand the program.

Bokone said Bo's Place is valuable because it provides a safe place for those who are grieving to sift through their emotions and learn to cope after someone close to them dies.

"[Death] is a reality that everyone is going to face at some point. Having that space available for something everyone is going to experience gives them the opportunity to know that they're not alone and [to gain] some healthy coping skills and learn how to talk about it. It's such a taboo subject in our society; yet it's a reality," she said.

Bo's Place always needs people in the community to join them in their work. Staine said its biggest need is for volunteer group facilitators, who go through a background check and training, observe groups and then are paired with another more experienced facilitator until they feel comfortable. All facilitators are overseen by a clinician. Individuals or groups can also volunteer to work in the kitchen, help with special projects and participate in community drives when the organization is collecting supplies. Those with quilting skills are always needed as well. Twice a year in March and November, the families go for a weekend-long camp in Burton, Texas, and volunteers, especially those in medical professions, are encouraged to help out.